Re: Net piracy?

[jamesb@ecst.csuchico.edu (James L Brookes)]

In article <306vrm$21t@bmerha64.bnr.ca>, Jeffrey Robertson
<jeffr@bmerha2a.bnr.ca> wrote:
[I wrote]
>>glasses were painted over.  What "killed" (uh, hello, it's not dead yet)
>>the Apple II was Apple deciding that they didn't want the II as a part of
>>their future.  It's incredibly simple, really.
>
>The supply of new software is pretty scarce.  There is no simple reason
>why.  Developers don't write, since the market is small.  The market is small
>because people have quit using the machine.  Some of those quit because there
>was not enough development going on.  Nice vicious circle.

And yet, if there had been an upgrade path and continued development on
successors to the Apple II, beyond the GS, the market wouldn't be so small,
because people wouldn't have quit using the machine (and/or its successors)
etc etc etc.

>(Of course, there's other reasons too.  Developers quit to work on new "cool"
>machines.  Users quit because they always have to have the latest "cool" toy.

Because there is no "cool" GS to upgrade to.

>The longer I live, the more I realize _nothing_ is "incredibly simple".)

Well, this is one counter example.  Live a bit longer and you might realize
that there is almost always an exception to any rule :-)

The IBM PC clone market is *rampant* with piracy.  But it's still thriving,
because the hardware is being constantly pushed and evolved, and programmers
stay with what they are comfortable with as long as some avenue for improvement
exists.  Same is true with the Mac.  Apple, for its own reasons (which I'm
not going to bother attacking; they were arguably decent business decisions),
decided not to extend the line, and that is why the userbase is shrunken
and shrinking.

>Your idea sounds great.  Invisible to the honest user; lets you nail the
>pirate.

Let's hope so :-)

>The only problem is that you actually have to find the pirated copy.  If
>my friend comes over to my house, and copys all my cool games off my hard
>drive, you'll never catch us.

This is true.  However, I think that a simple protection scheme will foil
99% of the userbase, in which case it is well worth it as long as you can
keep the user-annoyance factor minimized.

What I'm thinking about, long term, is a two-tiered scheme: something simple
to stop casual piracy, and an embedded serial number to enforce copyright
on distribution-level piracy.  (Note that the embedded number must be well
disguised, and your program can make no reference to it, or it can be
dissassembled and changed too easily).

(Note that I probably won't do this with the Apple IIgs versions of my
 programs.  I'm not expecting to make a heck of a lot of money anyway,
 and I almost feel like I can trust what is left of the GS community
 to give back what it can for my efforts.  However, when I port it to the
 Mac and/or Windoze environments, which is a distinct possibility, I shall
 have to devote some more time mulling this over)

>Here's another thought to muddy the waters of this discussion:  Some people
>have suggested that pirating would vanish if the price of software would
>drop.  No one wants to pay $100 for a shrinkwrapped game or word processor
>or whatever, and then find that they don't like it.  So they pirate it,
>ostensibly to test it, and then never get around to buying a licenced copy.
>Make it cheap, and people will gladly pay to soothe their guilty consciouns.
>(How _do_ you spell that?  I've tried everything I can think of!)

Conscience :)

It's possible.  It's also possible that legalization of drugs will prevent
much of the drug abuse that goes on today.  The real question is, who is
going to be the first to test this theory in practice? ;)

>Jeffrey Robertson                    |  jeffr@bnr.ca  |      BNR, Ottawa
-- 
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|          James Brookes                    jamesb@ecst.csuchico.edu       |
| "I *used* to think that 90% of everything is crap - then I found USENET" |
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